Keep On Trying; or Music from May

The last two months have been a whirlwind. Petruzzo Photography has been traveling and booking like crazy recently, which is a very good thing, but it’s also taken some time away from my personal artistic pursuits; These things ebb and flow though. The real downside here is that I’m a full three days late posting the work I’ve been doing on this song during April and May.

When I sat down to start writing this song, I had two goals in mind. First, I wanted to keep the lyrics simple and somewhat difficult to hear or understand. It’s a style I like in other’s work and thought I’d give it a try. I wanted elongated vocal melodies, contrasting my natural intuition which usually has them taking their cues from the drums. Second, I wanted the overall feel to be a bit droning. Now that I have to call it ‘done’, I can say I’m happy with the results of my first goal. The song has a total of only 10 words and no one who heard it seemed to know what they were. Success! The results of the second goal… well, I’m less satisfied.

The first few dozen iterations of the song used an organ noise in addition to the bass and drums to create these long melancholic tones throughout, and definitely achieved that ‘droning’ feeling I was looking for. But, after compression, they were really overpowering other sections of the song that I liked, namely the island guitar, envisioned and recorded by Jef Buchanan, which came quite a bit later in the process. I liked Jef’s work a lot and it really brought the motion of the song to life, so I went back to the drawing board on the organ. I ended up separating the high frequencies of the organ sound into that high pitched whistle noise at the beginning, and the lower frequencies into a tremolo’d out spacey sample, which comes in around 1:30.

No, this one isn’t my favorite since starting to record music in 2014. I think that is still reserved for The Shape of the Universe from August of last year. The beef is mostly with my lack of any real singing ability. Of course, if the point of any of this were to impress people with how well I can carry a note, I’d have stopped a long time ago.

For those who are interested, the track can be downloaded for free from SoundCloud above, or for a dollar from iTunes. It can also be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play and YouTube, among a bunch of others. I hope you enjoy!